Did you realize you have a right to not be offended? That you have a right to other people’s property and their labor? Were you unaware that you, as a citizen, have the same rights in the United States of America as an illegal alien? These are among the newly declared “rights” Democrats have bestowed on people through the power of simply saying they exist. The problem is this concept is fundamentally un-American.

Our rights as Americans are not granted to us by the government. Our government is empowered by us on the condition it does not infringe upon the rights with which we were born.

The Founding Fathers were brilliant in that they wrote the Constitution to limit government, not citizens. The First Amendment, for example, is explicit in how it starts, “Congress shall make no law…” The rights to free speech, freedom of religion, the press, assembly, etc., are not granted by the Constitution, they are protected from government by it.

The whole of the Bill of Rights is written the same way, “Shall not be infringed,” etc.

Since the government is not granting those individual rights – we were born with them – it can’t take them away. For liberal progressives, this concept is a threat – they prefer the government being not only the protector of rights, but the decider of what is and is not a right. That’s not liberty; it’s closer to slavery.

And slavery is what the left-wing Antifa would like to impose on the country. When Ben Shapiro spoke at UC Berkeley Thursday night you would have thought he was staging public executions of anyone who disagrees with him by the way these leftists greeted the event.

All Ben did was speak and answer questions; he responded to words with words. This is offensive to the left, who consider it to be violence.

With regularity, these progressive activists greet “violent speech” with actual physical violence before the speeches are given. The left, it seems, believes wholeheartedly in preemptive war against their fellow Americans who think wrong.

They believe they have the right to not be offended, and to stop anything they determine offensive. You have to have the mentality of a 5-year-old who mistook a pile of lead paint chips for Pringles to think any of this resides in the same time zone as a “right,” but this is the base of the Democratic Party nowadays.

Speaking of eating paint chips, Bernie Sanders revealed his long-awaited (by journalists) “Medicare for All” plan to end, once and for all, the United States being the world’s last bastion of hope for people on wait lists for life-saving medical treatment. “Health care is a right,” the Doc Brown from Back to the Future look-a-like has been grumbling for years.

But health care isn’t a right; it’s a service. Medical professionals provide this service in exchange for payment. No other “right” protected by the Constitution requires someone else to provide a service for you.

The closest is the Second Amendment, which liberals hate, because to exercise it, they say, you have to buy a gun. Actually, you don’t. You can be given one. You can trade for one. You can inherit one, or you can make one. But that doesn’t really matter – the right to keep and bear arms is unambiguous, yet liberals don’t argue gun manufacturers must provide them to people free of charge. Quite the opposite, actually.

Yet with health care, if it’s a right, people who’ve invested years of the life studying, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in that study, have no business expecting pay for their services because to do so would be to infringe upon the “fundamental right” of another human being. They could not refuse new patients, or really charge for their service. To do so would be akin to a poll tax.

Of course, health care is not a right, and Bernie knows this. But it sure sounds good to people who have no understanding of the concept of liberty and find the idea of personal responsibility to be as distasteful as differing political opinions.

Speaking of differing political opinions, the city council of College Park, Md., this week attempted to extend the right to vote in local elections to all “residents” of the city, regardless of immigration status. The argument liberals made was residents should have a say in their local government, which they would if they were in their home countries. But now illegal aliens will have a say over local representatives and referendums.

Democrats on the city council considered putting the idea on the ballot next year, but they were afraid their constituents wouldn’t vote the way they wanted, so they tried to impose their will on the people themselves. A bit of ironic hilarity from the party of gangs of unshowered mutants blocking traffic and chanting “This is what democracy looks like.”

Left unanswered is how long someone has to be a “resident” of College Park and how the actual citizens (you know, the suckers paying the bills) feel about this new “right” being granted to people with no business being in the country.

People who look to government to grant them rights are always finding new and creative ones they demand be honored by people who just want to be left alone. As evidenced by President Trump’s DACA decision, the problem with this idiocy is if you believe rights come from government there is little stopping the government from taking away some rights when it suits their desires. As an American the whole idea offends me, which means liberals will support doing away with it, right?